1. Field of the Invention
The inventive embodiment provides a method and apparatus for optimizing the power consumption of computer drives, and in particular, optimizing the power consumption of sleepy, or green, computer drives.
2. Description of Related Art
Recent emphasis on the environment and energy conservation has prompted the computer industry to produce computers that have reduced environmental impact, such as green computers. A conventionally defined green computer is a computer that has reduced power consumption.
The computer disk drive industry is currently developing “sleepy” drives. Sleepy drives are disk drives that are designed to save power when not in active use by spinning down to a slower speed or stopping altogether. The idea behind sleepy drives is to reduce the computer's energy consumption. Sleepy drives are known in the art, however, the problem with the conventional sleepy drive is that it impairs the computer's performance.
Once a sleepy drive is in sleep mode, the lag time required for the sleepy drive to become active makes sleepy drives an unacceptable and inefficient solution for many enterprise databases and applications which require instantaneous or expedient processing.
The hardware to implement sleepy drives is known in the art. However, the software to allow computer systems to intelligently take advantage of sleepy drives without an impact to performance is not currently available. Furthermore, the energy required to activate a sleepy drive from a stopped or reduced speed is significant as compared to the energy required to leaving the drive spinning. Acceleration is power consuming, and therefore, the number of accelerations must be minimized in order for the computer system to be truly green.
Therefore, there is a need for a method and apparatus that takes advantage of sleepy drives, but which significantly reduces the adverse performance that sleepy drives have on enterprise databases and applications while reducing energy consumption.